(for at the present day it needs courage) to remark, how extremely and faultily
difficult Shakespeare's language often is.9 It is so: you may find main scenes
in some of his greatest tragedies, King Lear for instance, where the language
is so artificial, so curiously tortured, and so difficult, that every speech has to
be read two or three times before its meaning can be comprehended. This
overcuriousness of expression is indeed but the excessive employment of a
wonderful gift?of the power of saying a thing in a happier way than any other
man; nevertheless, it is carried so far that one understands what M. Guizot
meant, when he said that Shakespeare appears in his language to have tried
all styles except that of simplicity.1 He has not the severe and scrupulous self-
restraint of the ancients, partly no doubt, because he had a far less cultivated
and exacting audience. He has indeed a far wider range than they had, a far
richer fertility of thought; in this respect he rises above them. In his strong
conception of his subject, in the genuine way in which he is penetrated with
it, he resembles them, and is unlike the moderns. But in the accurate limita
tion of it, the conscientious rejection of superfluities, the simple and rigorous
development of it from the first line of his work to the last, he falls below them,
and comes nearer to the moderns. In his chief works, besides what he has of
his own, he has the elementary soundness of the ancients; he has their impor
tant action and their large and broad manner; but he has not their purity of
method. He is therefore a less safe model; for what he has of his own is
7. Well-judged, fitting. (1779-1859). 8. By Boccaccio (1353): fourth day, fifth story. 1. F.P.G. Guizot (1787- 1874), French historian, 9. Introduction to tlte Literature of Europe (1838? discusses Shakespeare's sonnets in his Shakespeare39), chap. 23, by the historian Henry Hallam et Son Temps (1852) I 14.
.
1382 / MATTHEW ARNOLD
personal, and inseparable from his own rich nature; it may be imitated and
exaggerated, it cannot be learned or applied as an art. He is above all sugges
tive; more valuable, therefore, to young writers as men than as artists. But
clearness of arrangement, rigor of development, simplicity of style?these may
to a certain extent be learned; and these may, I am convinced, be learned best
from the ancients, who although infinitely less suggestive than Shakespeare,
are thus, to the artist, more instructive.
What, then, it will be asked, are the ancients to be our sole models? the
ancients with their comparatively narrow range of experience, and their widely
different circumstances? Not, certainly, that which is narrow in the ancients,
nor that in which we can no longer sympathize. An action like the action of
the Antigone of Sophocles, which turns upon the conflict between the hero
ine's duty to her brother's corpse and that to the laws of her country, is no
longer one in which it is possible that we should feel a deep interest. I am
speaking too, it will be remembered, not of the best sources of intellectual
stimulus for the general reader, but of the best models of instruction for the
individual writer. This last may certainly learn of the ancients, better than
anywhere else, three things which it is vitally important for him to know: the
all-importance of the choice of a subject; the necessity of accurate construc
tion; and the subordinate character of expression. He will learn from them how
unspeakably superior is the effect of the one moral impression left by a great
action treated as a whole, to the effect produced by the most striking single
thought or by the happiest image. As he penetrates into the spirit of the great
classical works, as he becomes gradually aware of their intense significance,
their noble simplicity, and their calm pathos, he will be convinced that it is this
